sights and
vigor into comparative politics generally. We need to adopt
a holonational approach to the study of political parties to
stimulate our thinking about the important dimensions of
variation among political parties. We need to assemble
comparable data on parties in a holonational framework to
give empirical import to our conceptualizations and to test
the theories that embody our concepts.

Not all
scholars agree on the desirability of, much less the need
for, a holonational approach to the comparative study of
political parties. Indeed, one of the most consistent
criticisms of my project that I encountered was that I ought
not and even could not conduct a study of political
parties that involved such different organizations as found
during our time period in Nicaragua, Burma, Guinea, East
Germany, Portugal, and France. My position on whether such
parties ought to be compared should now be clear; I
think it is essential for the development of party theory to
study different as well as similar parties. On the other
point, whether or not such parties can be compared,
the issue can be settled only by empirical
investigation.

This work is
aimed at advancing that investigation. It focuses on 158
political parties operating in 53 countries during the time
period 1950 to 1962, but it also traces the fate of those
parties through 1978 and embraces 50 new parties that
qualified for study between 1963 and 1978.

A word is in
order about what this book is and what it is not. It was not
designed as an encyclopedic compendium of facts about all
the world's political parties written by experts in the
politics of each country. Although the information it
contains has value along that line and will undoubtedly be
used for reference, the book was designed with a different
purpose in mind. This work was intended to impose
intellectual order upon the mass of facts about political
parties--to create concepts for interpreting such facts and
to harness them in the service of comparative analysis.
Thus, the conceptual framework offered herein is as
important as the facts amassed under it. Indeed, the data
that issue from this study are the joint products of the
conceptual framework and the factual information that it
interprets. For example, the specific procedure used by a
party for selecting its national leader is simply a fact
until it is interpreted in the context of a continuum of
variation in party practice that suggests the centralization
of power within the party. Thus, we assign quantitative
scores to each party for many "basic" variables (e.g.,
"selecting the national leader") that serve as indicators of
a smaller number of broader concepts (e.g., "centralization
of power") that are crucial to evaluating the character of
political parties.

The
statistical tables in Part One summarize the results of
scoring a sizable sample of the world's parties on the basic
variables in our conceptual framework. By consulting these
tables, the reader can learn how the parties of the world
tend to be distributed on important variables that pertain
to key concepts in the comparative analysis of political
parties. One can learn which practices are common, which are
rare, and what each practice signifies in the analysis of
party politics. For students of comparative politics, the
main value of this work probably lies in these survey
results. Serious researchers who wish to push the analysis
beyond the simple distributions reported in the tables will
want to work directly with the quantitative scores listed in
Part Two. Their research can be greatly aided through the
facilities of the Inter-University Consortium for Political
and Social Research at the University of Michigan, which
archives and distributes the quantitative data from the
study. Part One, in effect, constitutes the codebook for the
completely documented machine-readable data set available on
computer tape from the consortium.4

The listing of
party data in Part Two probably serves another set of
readers--those who merely seek basic information about
particular parties. They will be more interested in the
encyclopedic function of the volume. It is hoped that the
restricted coverage of the study will still be adequate to
serve their interests as well.

The twelve
basic concepts that form the core of the study's conceptual
framework appear broad enough to encompass the major
dimensions of variation of political parties as they
operated within ten cultural-geographical areas of the
world. The information available for scoring parties on the
numerous indicators of each of the twelve concepts varied
considerably in quantity and quality across countries.
Despite the constraints of the available information, we
succeeded in scoring most of our parties on most of our
approximately 100 indicator variables. We relied heavily on
modern microfilm and computer techniques of information
retrieval in our research, and we developed and employed
several new methods of data quality control to increase the
reliability of our data. We state explicitly whether our
judgment about the score for a party on a given indicator is
an inference from sketchy information or whether our
decision is based on consistent information from multiple
sources. Each coding judgment, moreover, is accompanied by a
note or longer comment elaborating the basis of the scoring
for that party. Because the information available for many
countries rarely anticipated the coding categories for our
variables, we tried to be as open and explicit as possible
in showing how we obtained comparability among our data.

4.
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social
Research, Study 7534. The consortium distributes a
codebook with the data set, but its codebook provides
only basic documentation essential to using the data.
Information about the data set is available from the
consortium at the University of Michigan, Box 1248, Ann
Arbor, Michigan 48106, U.S.A.